Introduction to Container Storage Interface (CSI)

This will enable storage vendors (SP) to develop a plugin once and have it work across a number of container orchestration (CO) systems.

CSI started as a joint proposal from a group of people who work on Docker, Kubernetes, Mesosphere and Cloud Foundry. CSI is currently in the early draft stage and seeking feedback from the community.

Draft spec for v0.1 authored by Jie Yu (Mesosphere), James DeFelice (Mesosphere) and Saad Ali (Google) can be accessed here:

Right after our bi-weekly CSI Community meeting today, Saad Ali sent a “Hello World” message from his twitter account(@the_saad_ali).

Saad Ali said “Adding new volume plugins to Kubernetes has been challenging. Now we have a clear path forward! Container Storage Interface (CSI) is in the works for 1.9. Stay tuned! “, “Before CSI, new volume plugins required either checking code into Kubernetes (and being stuck on k8s release cycles) or creating a Flex volume driver.”, “Kubernetes Flex Volume was an early attempt at pluggability, but it was difficult to deploy. We’ll continue to support Flex. But CSI will simplify storage plugin deployment and has broad industry support.”

Container Storage Interface (CSI) will get us one step closer to Storage-as-a-Service. Standardized interfaces improve the user experience and accelerate technology adoption. The idea was proven to work with Container Networking Interface (CNI).